Some observers see American academia as a bastion of leftist groupthink that indoctrinates students and silences conservative voices. Others see a protected enclave that naturally produces free-thinking, progressive intellectuals. Both views are self-serving, says Neil Gross, but neither is correct. Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? explains how academic liberalism became a self-reproducing phenomenon, and why Americans on both the left and right should take notice.

Academia employs a higher percentage of liberals than nearly any other profession. But the usual explanations—hiring bias against conservatives, correlations of liberal ideology with high intelligence—do not hold up to scrutiny. Drawing on a range of original research, statistics, and interviews, Gross argues that “political typing” plays an overlooked role in shaping academic liberalism. For historical reasons, the professoriate developed a reputation for liberal politics early in the twentieth century. As this perception spread, it exerted a self-selecting influence on bright young liberals, while deterring equally promising conservatives. Most professors’ political views formed well before they stepped behind the lectern for the first time.

Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? shows how studying the political sympathies of professors and their critics can shed light not only on academic life but on American politics, where the modern conservative movement was built in no small part around opposition to the “liberal elite” in higher education. This divide between academic liberals and nonacademic conservatives makes accord on issues as diverse as climate change, immigration, and foreign policy more difficult.

Neil Gross taught at the University of Southern California and Harvard University before joining the University of British Columbia faculty in 2008. Trained at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Ph.D., 2002), and holding a BA in Legal Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (1992), Gross has special interests in sociological theory, politics, the sociology of ideas and academic life, and the sociology of culture. He is the editor of Sociological Theory, a quarterly journal of the American Sociological Association.

The Institute for Public Knowledge is organizing a Public Forum Series on Sandy, Climate Change and the Future of New York City with the Marron Institute on Cities and the Urban Environment. The aim of this series is to engage scholars across New York University to think broadly about Superstorm Sandy, climate change, and the future of our city. All events in the series are free and open to the public, and feature scholars from NYU departments including Environmental Studies; Urban Planning; Sociology; Photography; Media, Culture, and Communication; Interactive Telecommunications; and Metropolitan Studies. The series is building off the conversation started at an IPK public forum in December 2012.

The Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK) brings theoretically serious scholarship to bear on major public issues. Located at NYU, it nurtures collaboration among social researchers in New York and around the world. It builds bridges between university-based researchers and organizations pursuing practical action.

Recent mass shootings in Newtown, CT and Aurora, CO have reignited a perennial debate about gun control and mental illness in America. Both shootings involved individuals with publically reported diagnoses of mental illness, and both also involved firearms that were banned just a decade ago. The political arguments for ensuring the safety of citizens often take one of two forms: Keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them, or keep certain guns out of the hands of all people. We also know that gun laws historically have been enforced differently in urban and rural areas, and between individuals of different races. But the existing regulations we have vary between municipalities and states, and all reflect some set of views across a range of questions and spectrum of values. Who should have access to firearms? What weapons should be legal for private citizens--and how should we enforce these laws? Should mental health be a factor in gun ownership eligibility--and if so how do you determine mental illness, and protect the privacy rights of the mentally ill? What role does race play in policy formation and in enforcement, and how can we make the system more just?

Gary Belkin, MD, PhD, MPH; Associate Professor and Director, Program in Global Mental Health, New York University School of Medicine; Senior Director of Psychiatric Services, New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation.

In 2012, the annual World Economic Forum at Davos convened under the theme of ‘the great transformation’ wrought by economic liberalization in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In 2013, the UNDP Human Development Report, The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, similarly argues that rapid progress in the Global South is driving a historic shift in global dynamics, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, bringing billions into a new global middle class, In the dark shadow of the unfolding economic crisis in the Global North, this optimism focuses on ‘emerging markets’ where the gains of liberalization are said to have built new foundations for prosperity anchored in vast expanding consumer populations. Nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America are now routinely showcased for global investors and policymakers as success stories ‘opened up’ by structural adjustment and economic reforms. Such direct linkages between state policy and social progress have been debated throughout modern history but are now particularly poignant as a world financial crisis and mounting social inequity and disruption generate social costs that call into question the capacity of ‘free markets’ and neo-liberal economic reforms to sustain human improvement.

Cities are focal points for the social mobility and prosperity that signify ‘the rise of the South,’ and also highlight the social immobility and deprivation that produce our planet of slums and agrarian and environmental crises. In this multi-disciplinary dissertation workshop, we focus on the inequity of globalization in and around urban centers of the global South, from various theoretical and empirical perspectives, including but not limited to fields of history, sociology, anthropology, political science, political economy and development studies. We invite PhD students who have completed substantial dissertation research on any aspect of urbanized inequity in the world of globalization to discuss their work at a two-day workshop in New York City on 21-22 June, 2013.

Prospective participants should send (1) a letter describing their research and reasons for joining the workshop, (2) a curriculum vita, and (3) a short writing sample drawn from their dissertation, in one combined PDF file email attachment, to David Ludden This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
(New York University) and Dr. Ravinder Kaur This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
(University of Copenhagen) by 15 April 2013.

The Superstorm Research Lab is the winner of the PSC-CUNY Environmental Health and Safety Watchdog's 2013 Clearing the Air Award,"given to the individual/group that best contributes to a better understanding of occupational or environmental health."

The awardwas given for the group's presentation at CUNY’s Twelfth Annual Nature, Ecology and Society Colloquium, "SuperStorm Sandy: Before, During & After"

About the presentation:

One of the major dilemmas facing contemporary urban governance and environmental action in the United States is the mismatch betweeninherited political boundaries and emerging sociospatial urban realities. This project investigates what impact an event such as Sandy can have on such structures. The common assumption is that a heroic policy, NGO, or popular effort will be needed to transform inherited structures to overcome these mismatches. This project instead investigates what impact an event can have on such structures.

In Sewell’s (2005) terms, events are the fateful collective contingencies that interrupt the reproduction of structures. In the literature on crises and disasters, this is a familiar way to understand the unexpected and transformative impact such events can have on “business as usual”, and this project applies these insights to the impact of Hurricane Sandy on the structure of urban politics in the New York City area.

This paper is based on preliminary research with the Superstorm Research Lab collective. Based on interviews with policy actors, NGOs, first responders, and residents of affected areas, we ask how Sandy has potentially restructured patterns of governance and action based on stakeholder understandings of critical processes following Sandy.

About the Colloquium:

Hurricane Sandy had drastic impacts on 29 October, 2012. This year’s Nature Ecology Society Colloquium is intended to open up a conversation around Hurricane Sandy. We recognize that politics play a part in this conversation, that there are complex social and environment justice issues that have and need to be understood, and that there must be a rebuilding effort that is sensitive to all of these aspects. We hope this colloquium can be a space where presenters will openly interrogate these and other issues.

The Nature, Ecology and Society Network is the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Interdisciplinary Network for researchers, activists and other colleagues whose work is at the intersection of Nature Ecology and Society.

One of the major dilemmas facing contemporary urban governance and environmental action in the United States is the mismatch between inherited political boundaries and emerging sociospatial urban realities. This project investigates what impact an event such as Sandy can have on such structures. The common assumption is that a heroic policy, NGO, or popular effort will be needed to transform inherited structures to overcome these mismatches. This project instead investigates what impact an event can have on such structures. In Sewell’s (2005) terms, events are the fateful collective contingencies that interrupt the reproduction of structures. In the literature on crises and disasters, this is a familiar way to understand the unexpected and transformative impact such events can have on “business as usual”, and this project applies these insights to the impact of Hurricane Sandy on the structure of urban politics in the New York City area.

This paper is based on preliminary research with the Superstorm Research Lab collective. Based on interviews with policy actors, NGOs, first responders, and residents of affected areas, we ask how Sandy has potentially restructured patterns of governance and action based on stakeholder understandings of critical processes following Sandy.

About the Colloquium:

Hurricane Sandy had drastic impacts on 29 October, 2012. This year’s Nature Ecology Society Colloquium is intended to open up a conversation around Hurricane Sandy. We recognize that politics play a part in this conversation, that there are complex social and environment justice issues that have and need to be understood, and that there must be a rebuilding effort that is sensitive to all of these aspects. We hope this colloquium can be a space where presenters will openly interrogate these and other issues.

The Nature, Ecology and Society Network is the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Interdisciplinary Network for researchers, activists and other colleagues whose work is at the intersection of Nature Ecology and Society.

The aim of this working group is to foster rigorous, interdisciplinary discussion on the theories and praxis of armed conflicts, post-conflict societies, and the roles of their various social actors. To that end, we invite interested NYU faculty members and graduate students to submit an application to present research in progress, which we will collectively work to develop and refine.

The Working Group on Conflict, Armed Groups, and Peace is founded on the premise that the complex nature of conflict and its impact on societies necessitate a broad, interdisciplinary conversation between scholars across the social sciences and humanities. To this end, CAP provides a working space for faculty and graduate students to share work in progress on subjects such as: cultures and societies of peace and violence; war; military and paramilitary organizations; human rights and humanitarianism; military-civilian relations; security; theories of violence; technological warfare (e.g. drones, cyber-warfare); and other related topics. When appropriate, CAP invites guest speakers and expert practitioners to share their unique insights, perspectives, and experiences. By engaging voices from a variety of disciplines and sectors, CAP strives to cultivate a community of individuals who share an interest in advancing research on conflict, armed groups, and peace that is informed by the breadth and expertise of scholars in a wide range of fields.

To apply, please submit a one-page statement of your research project and a brief bio to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
.

The Institute for Public Knowledge and NYU Sociology's Applied Quantitative Research Master's program are hosting the IPK's first ever datathon, a workshop bringing together academics, journalists, and data engineers to explore a big question in a short amount of time. The theme of the March 9th event is "Social and Meteorological Data," which will encourage teams to play with different ways to combine these often disparate forms of data in configurations that illuminate the relationship between society and climate.

This two week intensive residency will trace a derivative sensibility—a way of thinking, feeling, measuring--across dimensions of economy, polity and culture. Our founding premise is that derivatives are a new form of social wealth whose mechanisms, material forms and social relations can be rethought as a means to achieve a generalized social benefit. To grasp the derivative as a prevailing means of wealth to which social life itself is expansively indebted, we will engage some of the foundational treatments of capitalist society—Marx’s analysis of total social surplus; Weber’s consideration of decision-making under uncertainty; Durkheim’s intimations of the liquidity of the social; and Bourdieu’s approach to a corporeally situated sensibility.

The first week will feature a series of seminars facilitated by the six conveners on a progressive sequence of themes: 1) derivatives and the social; 2) logics of the derivative: volatility, spreads, liquidity, and arbitrage; 3) social wealth, regulation, and governance; 4) the rise of financialism: regimes of measure, 1971-2008; 5) derivative directions for social life. These morning sessions will be followed by thematically-linked roundtables in the afternoon on such topics as algorithms and financial modeling; public finance; higher education; alternative finance and entrepreneurialism; arts, design, and social media; mobilizations and interventions.

Based on these sessions, participants will write short statements that engage concrete sites, instances, and expressions of this larger derivative sensibility. These applications or apps, linked to the participants’ own interests and research, will then provide the basis for discussion and workshopduring the second week, to be capped by summative and speculative reflections.

Ultimately, the aim of our intensive ten day institute is to come to terms with the significance of the pervasiveness of derivatives; trace their sensibility to a grasp of certain fundamental societal dynamics; generate a comprehensive view of contemporary capitalism that opens to a way of re-imagining political alternatives and re-valuing critical practices. A major focus will be developing a future program to disseminate these ideas and analyses.

Application

To apply, send (in digital format) a brief statement of interest which identifies how you see your work intersecting with this project and what questions and consequences you would like to pursue during the Summer Institute to Sonia Zmihi at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
by March 15, 2013. Please also attach a copy of your current cv and relevant samples of recent work. Decisions will be made by April 10th.

Fees

Tuition $1000 (We are hopeful that graduate students have access to departmental support for this workshop. However, limited financial aid will be available to students who lack this support—please include a separate request for financial assistance for consideration for this aid.)

Housing $350-$700 (Beds in NYU dormitories will be arranged at this approximate cost depending on room configuration, number of roommates, and availability. Participants are also welcome to arrange their own housing.)

Cultures of Finance Summer Institute Prospectus

The booms and busts of the last several decades and more recent catastrophes such as 9/11, Katrina, Fukushima, and Sandy mark ours as an age of radical uncertainty. Our responses to these uncertainties have ranged from deregulated financialization to the political hedging strategies of both the reactionary right and radical left. The most visible forms of managing these risks have been in the financial sector in the explosive development of financial engineering, driven by the outsized corporate profits that financialization has produced. The breakthroughs have been in pricing risk but what has been overlooked is that at a deeper social level uncertainty has always been a motivating force in the development of capitalism, whether it be in the form of the existential uncertainty that drove Weber's ascetic Calvinists, Schumpeter's 'creative destruction', the Knightian uncertainty of entrepreneurs, or Fischer Black's ‘noise’ that makes trading possible. By placing it in a larger socio-historical and cultural context, our contention is that the development of financialism is more like that of a social movement than a purely economic phenomenon; its understanding requires drawing upon not only financial concepts such as arbitrage, risk, and volatility but also uncertainty, ritual, charisma, aura, and play.

The rise of financialism can be traced to a series of shocks in the early seventies--the dismantling of Bretton Woods, the oil crisis, the 1973 bear market, what was then called ‘democratic overload’, and soaring inflation--coinciding with the development of the Black-Scholes equations and the founding of the Chicago Options exchange, which form the crucible for the rise of contemporary risk management and financial engineering. Black-Scholes presents a way of looking at risk and uncertainty through measuring volatility and spreads, which will become a foundation for the new finance capitalism. It was the culmination of a line of thinking about risk and return that starts with the axiomatization of expected utility by Von Neumann and Morgenstern and is refined by Harry Markowitz’s development of portfolio theory and Modigliani and Miller’s formalization of arbitrage. This trajectory within finance also captures a transformation in the way we think about risk outside of finance, from focusing on what might be called ‘directional risks’ to the analysis of volatility and spreads.

Investors have long had an informal sense that the payoff of their bet on the direction in which prices will move depends on the magnitude by which prices have historically varied around their average. Portfolio theory formalized these intuitions as a theory of maximizing returns relative to risk through diversification (“not putting all your eggs in one basket”) and went on to develop techniques (using the concept of ‘arbitrage’) for determining how much an investor should expect to be paid for variance in the value of an asset or portfolio regardless of the direction in which it moves. Fischer Black and Myron Scholes combined these insights in their formula for pricing options that is now seen as the foundation of modern finance. In the Black-Scholes formula an option on an asset is priced as the cost of hedging (for a limited time and within a defined range) the risks associated with the movement of the asset’s prices above or below their historical average. The most important variable in the formula is volatility, which is technically defined as the square root of the variance of prices, and the investor's expected return on the asset drops out altogether. An option’s Black-Scholes price thus reflects the historical cost of shedding directional risk—whether underlying prices will go up or down—and assuming instead the risk that the volatility (historical spread) of those prices will change as the option itself is traded. This way of thinking about volatility has become so fundamental to the practice of finance itself that the market price at which an option is actually traded is routinely used to calculate what the historical volatilities used to calculate the Black-Scholes price will have been going forward.

The technical literature on finance is, thus, based on measuring the relative spreads between the volatilities of different assets—how these spreads change (co-vary) over time. This measurement becomes the key to the production and pricing of new, financial, assets that can be used to lock-in (preserve/(accumulate) the value of pre-existing assets notwithstanding the turbulence of underlying markets. The creation of a market in these financial spreads thus captures in the form of asset prices the level of uncertainty that exists in society over whether past volatilities will continue into the future. But perhaps more importantly, volatility is indifferent to the directionality of risk: therefore creating tradable assets that allow the market to price volatility itself becomes one of the key components in the derivative creation of wealth that can survive the upturns and downturns in underlying markets. Financial derivatives, such as options, thus allow people to secure risk by locking-in otherwise volatile spreads for limited periods of time so as preserve and accumulate wealth in the form of a predictable stream of revenue.

Finance, as a form of thought, exploits constantly changing levels of uncertainty/anxiety about the future to create a market for products based on volatility spreads that can be bought and sold to realize or preserve a present gain. These gains can be economic or symbolic—from the economic profits of riding implied volatility waves in derivative trading to the symbolic capital and social recognition of 'shooting the curl' in extreme surfing or the mixed gains of going ‘all-in’ in no-limit Texas hold'em—each presupposes its own distinctive form of liquidity or sociability, whether it be that of the traders in the derivatives market or the social recognition of one’s peers. In our age of uncertainty, becoming a better 'risk manager' under conditions of fundamental uncertainty has become well nigh obligatory despite highly disparate conditions of opportunity to do so.

The more exposed we feel, the more we seek ways to calculate the observed volatilities of the eventualities we fear. The relative distance between what we expect and what we observe, the gap between our aspirations and our experience, the patterns of movement between variations brought into relation with one another—define what is meant by a spread. Spreads are evident in all walks of life: bond markets, tax exemptions and electoral campaigns; poker, baseball and extreme sports; efforts to deal with disaster, reparation, and with terrorism. Each has its attendant protocols of measure with corresponding algorithms of deficit and gain, justice and fairness, which govern when to hold and fold, buy and sell, wound or heal, drop in or bail out.

The fact that derivatives can in theory be created to price spreads of all sorts makes these financial products a new form in which wealth can be accumulated and upon which claims can be made. As we have seen in the past forty years, but especially since the corporate bailout of 2008, huge transfers of wealth have already happened and continue to happen in the form of derivatives. These transfers dwarf those that are possible through traditional methods of redistributive politics such as taxation of GDP (individual, corporate). The political challenge is to redirect these schemes away from the apparent necessities of scarcity, austerity, debt and deficit for the many toward social claims on this wealth that direct it toward common needs for investment in infrastructure, expansive social goods, and creatively, critically-engaged cooperative knowledge.

The quandary we face is that the massive wealth presented by derivatives appears inaccessible; either because it is seen as the restricted province of those who are entitled to make a proprietary claim upon it, or because it seems overly daunting to enter the technically obscure world of derivatives and yield a language for apprehending how they move our own. Generating this critical language is the task of disclosing what could be called a derivative sensibility. This entails treating a comprehension of the world from the perspective of spreads in motion. But putting spreads in motion requires the addition of two additional concepts taken from finance but given a social twist: liquidity and arbitrage. Liquidity means that as long as the spreads remain in motion, some value can be realized because there is a social demand for it. But if that movement gathers too much force, becomes excessive beyond the point of tangible gain, the intensity of change or volatility will overwhelm the capacity to maintain a stream of worth.

Liquidity in the face of volatility is the generalized context within which risk is managed and momentary fixity in the form of price, scoring, ranking or some other measure can be applied. This action of moving into an opening between spreads in order to close them in an act of pricing, measure, or movement is termed arbitrage. Arbitrage is familiar in trading, but also evident among forecasters of elections like Nate Silver, or among the most accomplished practitioners of extreme sport such as big wave surfers. Arbitrage acts on the spread to close it, but also open it again to the next opportunity. A derivative sensibility then accounts for what recurs socially and materially across these various sites and practices and allows us to recognize the pervasiveness not only of accumulable wealth that could be held in common, but a generalizable sociality that could drive action together. This at least is the analytic framework we are seeking to develop.

This derivative sensibility suffuses or is immanent to our present moment. Yet to begin to describe what that moment is, where its potential lies, and how it came to be, given all the directions that the movement of society might take, requires a re-engagement with some of the most persuasive and extensive accounts of social theory. This is our speculative turn. Our opening gambit is to place the derivative in a conception where it was only tacit, and then to see how this opportunity to theorize the sociality of derivatives allows us to bring to notice what is difficult to value in our current conjuncture. This move allows us to see in the social logic of the derivative the contours of what might be called the ‘social valuation problem’: how do the things that money couldn’t buy become commodities that can be priced, bought, and sold? Economists focus on pricing things that are already assets, thus drawing a line between the social and the economic.

Our question focuses on the social production of finance capitalism; how does contemporary finance transform social uncertainty into manageable risk? What might be called a ‘pre-capitalist valuation problem’ has been at the heart of the anthropological studies of exchange from Durkheim’s Arunta to Bourdieu’s Kabyle and David Graeber’s ruminations on value and debt. But a more modern version of it appears in both Marx and Weber, which allows us to see their accounts of the development of capitalism as complementary rather than antagonistic. In the opening chapters of Volume I of Capital, Marx shows how something that had never been priced before, i.e., labor-time, becomes a commodity that creates a new source of wealth in the form of capital. Weber finds the spirit of capitalism exemplified in Benjamin Franklin’s excursus on how “time is money”, which brilliantly utilizes the opportunity cost of idleness to demonstrate the productivity of time. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism shows how a religious movement transforms an existential uncertainty over salvation into an ethos and world-view that gives birth to modern capitalism. Temporal spreads are at the heart of Marx’s account of relative surplus value and Weber’s existential tension between the sacred and the profane; these will become objectified as arbitrage and decision-making under uncertainty in finance capitalism.

To accomplish this move, we turn to Marx’s account of the total social wealth, which he abstracted from its most simple expression, the commodity. What would it mean to read the derivative into his critique of capital and to see in the tendency for profits to fall a condition whereby social capital or finance emerges to price these various spreads? Weber, in turn, provides a compelling account of decision-making under uncertainty, where the calculating attitude threatens to unmoor the underlying values introduced through the rationalizing regime of measure that drove the spread of capitalism. What would it entail to insert the figure of the arbitrager in the phenomenology of action implied through Weber’s account of charisma? Durkheim’s notion of the collective effervescence sustains the recurrent collective representations that are enacted by sacrifice and ritual. His insights allow us to see how preserving liquidity in the face of changing volatility can itself be taken as a generative social process. Finally, Bourdieu’s work on the habitus extends this treatment of ritual and play to a corporally and spatially situated sensibility. His presentation of this spread of dispositions in Distinction might now be rethought in an era of cross-identification with the outliers, extremes, and exceptional bodily practices that circulate in our midst.

Reading the derivative back into classical social theory allows us to move forward with an understanding of what has brought us to the present. These principles of industrial capitalism, modern society, progressive development have been selectively re-arranged in the past forty years in which finance and derivatives have come to prominence. All that was solid might once have been dissipated in some gaseous state but now is recouped and liquefied. Risks that might have escaped valuation have now become priceable. Volatility that would have seemed to bring history to an end now appears as the condition of possibility for further mobilization and transformation. The forward drive to growth and expansion on an ever receding horizon is now re-oriented as a lateral slide that nestles in the intimate nooks and nanostructures we locate in the spaces between us.

Capitalism had once based its promise and prospects on the conquest of other spaces and new times. Now it has already enveloped the globe and seems to have abdicated its utopian investment in a future that is better than and different from the present. Under conditions of fundamental uncertainty the pricing of historically measurable risk seeks to harvest value from the already occupied spaces within, to realize the gains of a future brought into the present—suffusing accumulation with the internal dynamics of liquidity and volatility. Clearly not all is new with the capitalism of our day; but figuring out what events and movements compel us to rethink and how to enter the body of the moment to see what might be figured otherwise remains the challenge for any serviceable critique of our lives in the contemporary cultures of finance.

The Superstorm Research Laboratory (SRL) at NYU is looking for interns during the spring and summer semesters for hands-on social and environmental justice research. Our goal is to explore narratives about three substantive topics of contemporary concern—inequality, climate change, and urban governance—and their relationships to one another within the context of Hurricane Sandy. Our principal method will be to interview stakeholders from across the city—policy actors in different state agencies, engaged business people, members of relevant NGOs and other civil society institutions, professional and volunteer first responders, and residents in Zone A, especially in the Coney Island Area.

As a mutual-aid research collective bound by a community agreement, SRL is a unique group whose interactions with fellow researchers, interns, and interviewees reflect a commitment to social justice. Depending on the scope of interns’ involvement, they will gain valuable experience within SRL's unique research collective environment, including research methods, how to collaborate with other researchers using social justice values, interpretation of data, events planning, web design, curriculum design, the preparation of public reports, and other forms of outreach to the NYU community. We strongly encourage you to apply before January 25, though we will also accept applications on a rolling basis.

Interns will be trained in various research roles, depending on the semester hired, including:

interviewing stakeholders

methods for taking research notes at public meetings and other events

coding interview transcripts and public documents

interpretation of interview data

ethics of research for environmental and social stakes

facilitating research meetings using social justice protocols

In addition to research, interns may participate in other key aspects of the project, such as the following:

the design and construction of an online archive of the data and public reports that we produce

planning public events for stakeholders from around New York City

consultation and planning of mini-curricula on Sandy’s aftermath for use in classroom settings

assisting in the production of a public report featuring our group’s data, as well as data gathered and analyzed by other research projects around New York City

making and tracking contacts with key stakeholders in New York City

cowriting research articles

Desired skills (please specifically address these in your cover letter (note, we do not require one applicant to possess them all!):

We welcome interns at any point during this time frame. Note that interviews will occur mainly in January and early February, and coding and other tasks will occur afterwards.

Interns will work 1-10 hours a week, with some weeks having much heavier work loads than others. We will attempt to accommodate your schedule. Note that heaviest workloads will be at the beginning and end of the spring semester.

Please send us your application by Jan 25th (though we will also accept interns during the semester if we have space and work available). In your cover letter, specifically detail which of the above skills you have, what your main area of interest or research is in relation to Hurricane Sandy, and your earliest available start date. Please send a CV and cover letter to both Daniel Aldana Cohen at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
and Max Liboiron at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

This is an unpaid position, though travel and other needed resources will be covered. Pending future grants, interns may potentially to become part of the paid research team.